Soooo remember how I got really mad after reading The Waste Lands because Stephen King ended it with “the most cliffhangery cliffhanger ever?” Song of Susannah is almost as bad, but I’m even more infuriated because of what comes after the ending: a “coda,” or fake diary entries by Stephen King himself. Seriously.

I’m going to go ahead and declare a general spoiler alert because as I said before, it’s hard to get this far into a series without ruining the whole thing for someone who hasn’t. So there you go.

Song of Susannah starts exactly where Wolves of the Calla left off: the ka-tet has just won the battle with the Wolves only to discover that Susannah has wheeled off to the cave and vanished through the door. They use some Manni-magic to get through to her and to Calvin Tower in Maine, except the wrong people end up at the wrong places, or so they think. So Eddie and Roland end up dealing with Tower while Callahan, Jake, and Oy chase after Susannah/Mia, who is about to give birth to the Spawn of Satan, or something like that. Along the way, Roland and Eddie meet Stephen King himself, and they have a palaver while my eyes rolled back into my head so far I almost couldn’t keep reading. Seriously, Stephen King, this stuff is stupid. And then, of course, there’s the baby being born. We get to see all sorts of evil beings and even a roasting baby. After some Dark Towery shenanegans, Susannah/Mia end up giving birth. THE END. Screams of agony. YEP, THAT’S IT. The only difference between this time and the Blaine the Mono ridiculousness is that I don’t care as much.

Which is exactly what I said after I finished Wolves of the Calla, and we see how long that lasted. Three weeks, maybe? Which also means that I’ll be finishing this seven-book series very, very soon.

Oh, and that wasn’t quite the end. There’s still the matter of the Coda. As Susannah/Mia push out this demon spawn, the story itself cuts out, and we get Stephen King’s self-indulgent craptacular crapfest in which he is driven to write the rest of the series after The Gunslinger. Also: you know the car that hit him several years ago? Well, in the book, it killed him. Yep. Fun times. In the book, he also makes himself out to be something like one of the Beams, and I’m sure his death will lead to all sorts of problems. Fun times.

As stupid as these novels are, I can’t seem to tear myself away. They’re fun! And now, I’m too far in to stop. I should have known what was coming with the idiocy of The Drawing of the Three. Sure, the lobstrosities are some of my Very Favorite Fictional Creatures Ever, but they’re dumb, and the stupid doors on the beach are even worse. There. I’ve said my fill.

In sum, I like this book because I can’t help myself. It really is terrible.

Just as I finished reading Song of Susannah, our new refrigerator was delivered! The refrigerator itself is fantastic and beautiful and glorious, but the delivery was so bad that it gets its own post. I’m a little surprised that it didn’t kill me.